Listen to Future Loves Past’s sweeping new single, “Pretty Things”

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Not everyone living in Tempe, AZ is as desperate to abandon its borders as this news editor. Take, for instance, the indie-psych sextet known as Future Loves Past. Since forming in late 2010, the band has released a string of EPs and singles, and played countless shows across the Valley, carving a niche with a blend of music I once (drunkenly) referred to as, “If The Flaming Lips became a soul-pop band after Clouds Taste Metallic.”

But even as they’ve become a quintessential Phoenix/Tempe band, Future Loves Past is looking to expand their reach beyond the Copper State with the release of their latest album, All the Luscious Plants, due out September 24th via Common Wall Media.

“We like to deliver these sometimes hard to digest themes to the listener with happy/upbeat/pretty backdrops,” said frontman Eric W. Palmer. “These themes inspired the LP name. The songs are like the plants that we have grown and cultivated. All the Luscious Plants is a lyric from one of the songs from the album – ‘Fear Of Growing’, a song about fear of change and the complete lyric goes, ‘All the luscious plants – why do they grow?’ But it just means why is there change? Why is there time and existence? It’s a mind fuck.”

If Palmer’s summation wasn’t enough to hook you, then check out the album’s latest single, “Pretty Things”. While without the band’s groovier, more psychedelic qualities, it’s a straightforward pop-rock number that glows with a translucent haze. The march of funky bass and steady guitar sweep fluidly into the chorus, a mighty deluge of warm harmonies and shimmery organ. And while the song’s primary lyrical output focuses on repetition of a harsh truth (“all the pretty things around you can only take you so far away”), the music itself proves that truly pretty things can, indeed, be profoundly transitive.

The song was inspired by a documentary I watched about the Jonestown Massacre and the cult phenomenon surrounding it, Palmer said. “It is fascinating and terrifying that people can be so loyal to something so false and so self-destructive. Life is like an illusion within an illusion, or a game within a game. We are all wearing our bodies and personalities as masks as we play the game. We all play the role of victim and victimizer in life many times over. So the song is about pretension as it manifests in an ugly and self-destructive way.

For more sounds, have a listen to the album’s lead single, “Grow Up Tall”.